An old-school junkyard, Warhoops Auto and Truck Parts squats on 15.5 acres of dirt speckled with the detritus of our throwaway culture. A Cadillac propped against a tree exposes its Northstar to the sky. Bent buses and crumpled cop cars line up against a white fence. It’s forgettable real estate except for one key attribute: location.

Tucked out of sight in an industrial area in the working class Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, Michigan, across the road from a Ford transmission factory and just a little north of the plant where Chrysler assembles the 200—and a straight shot up Mound Road from the General Motors Technical Center in Warren—the yard has been a fixture in the area since 1955. Founded by Harry Warholak Sr. the same year GM moved its Research and Design operations into the Tech Center, Warhoops is steeped in local car lore. Yet the wider automotive world will forever know it as the place GM sent its Motorama dream cars for their unceremonious burial.

Current-day proprietor Harry Warholak Jr. invites us to sit in his car for an interview because there’s no room and no privacy in his small office, which is little more than a warm shed packed with a counter, a desk, scattered memorabilia, and a door to hide some plumbing in the corner. Warholak explains that “Warhoops” was a nickname acquired by his dad during World War II, based on his ­Polish surname. The elder Warholak earned a Bronze Star as a mechanic tending B-17 bombers. Until he died in 1997, some people still called him Harry Warhoops, even after he turned the nickname into a trademark.

Warhoops proprietor Harry Warholak and the Cadillac Town Car today.

“I was in high school, probably 14 or 15, when Dad took me with him down to Warren to see these cars,” Warholak remembers. “It was all the Motorama dream cars, by that big steel-roof dome they’ve got at the Tech Center. I was too young to be involved in the negotiation, but you can imagine how my eyes got like saucers. These dream cars–the Buick Wildcats, Cadillacs, La Salles, Firebirds, everything–and he told me they were coming to our yard.”

That would have been 1958, in the midst of a recession, when GM contacted Warhoops to scrap its show cars. The Motorama show itself, a rolling extravaganza of fantasy sheetmetal, had been victimized by the downturn. Canceled in 1957, there would be only two more, for ’59 and ’61, and those revolved around dressed-up production models with custom paint and fancy interiors—faint efforts compared with the dream cars of earlier years.

“The way Harry Warhoops told it to me,” remembers Joe Bortz, whose 1988 “discovery” and acquisition of intact cars from the yard has grown into legend in collector-car circles due to Bortz’s tenacity, luck, and timing, “there was a big downturn in sales in ’57 and ’58 and some accountants at GM looking to save money said, ‘Look, we’re paying to store all these cars and we’re not using them. So just scrap them.’ ”

According to several staffers of that era, it was standard practice at GM Design to dismantle unwanted property and call a metal dealer to haul off the scrap. “But these ones were mostly fiberglass. Many didn’t have engines, some didn’t even have metal frames,” says Warholak. “So maybe that’s why the salvage guy they normally used wasn’t interested. I never got that whole story, but the upshot is they called Dad.”

Relevant, perhaps, is that design vice president Harley Earl hit the mandatory retirement age on November 22, 1958, and was handing over the reins to Bill Mitchell. The cars “belonged” to the design department, and Earl was usually the arbiter of their fates. Some running show cars had even found their way into executive garages over the years. It could be that the Motorama cars were briefly without a corporate champion to defend them from those who dream only in dollars.